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Meanwhile, Ignatius Press founder and editor, Father Joseph Fessio, cuts to the chase when it comes to the NYT's piece:

Great theme: the bishops wanted to do more but were handcuffed by the Vatican's--and Ratzinger's--in action. That's a wonderful storyline which is a masterpiece of topsyturvydom.

One question can cut through it all: You are a bishop, say in 1980, and you find one of your priests has been abusing little boys. What do you do? Nothing whatever prevents you from removing that priest from ministry, disciplining him, and reporting him to civil authorities. All talk about "arcane canonical processes", "complicated and overlapping jurisdictions", is simply beside the point.

And if one needed any indication of the mindset of the NYT, the beginning of this sentence would provide it: "As Father Gauthé was being prosecuted in Louisiana, Cardinal Ratzinger was publicly disciplining priests in Brazil and Peru for preaching that the church should work to empower the poor and oppressed,..."

Comments

I am a FB friend of Cathy Lyn Grossman's who is the religion reporter for on line USA Today. Won't go into details of why I'm her FB friend but anyway, she smarmily linked to that story to which I commented.

"You know Cathy that article is so at variance with the facts it's just about funny. Oh yes the Wisconsin priest was an abuser but the rest of the piece is a mish mash of half truths & lies totally out of sequence with what happened. If you must know about the Wisconsin case - even the local police who investigated dropped it. Cathy you are feeding off a media beatup by print media writhing in their death throes and you know it"

I don't think the NYT came up with this line of attack on its own. It's too arcane. I think they were fed the line by liberal church bureaucrats. Even the very weak Sean Michael Winters knew that there was something wrong with this story, and tried to investigate: "This morning I consulted two highly respected canon lawyers. One said that the documents did give the CDF authority in the disputes. The other said the documents only gave CDF authority over the crime of solicitation in the confessional." I bet the "highly respected canon lawyer" who backed up the Times is in on it. He may even be the guy who made it up in the first place.